Weekly Readings #148 (12/02/24-12/08/24)

network, movement, generation, empire

A weekly newsletter on what I’ve written, read, and otherwise enjoyed.

This week I released “A Man of No Fortune” for The Invisible College, my series of literature courses for paid subscribers. The episode is about Ezra Pound and why he, though he might have been the 20th century’s most sheerly gifted poet, did not become its greatest poet. This might be the best single episode I’ve done this year, leaving aside some of the Ulysses sequence’s torrid summer intensities. I believe I braided a tragic biographical parable, miscellaneous historical esoterica, and explications of some fine poetry into the single most powerful statement of my controversial thesis: artists, to save their (our) own souls, to preserve their (our) only true wealth, must not sacrifice their (our) art in the devouring furnace of radical politics. But you may be the judge of how nearly I’ve approached the elusive art of the podcast. Thanks to all my current paid subscribers and all those who are about to become paid subscribers!

I remind you once more, as 2024 draws to its close, that 2025’s most exciting new release in literary fiction will be my own Major Arcana, forthcoming from Belt Publishing in April, which you can pre-order here, get from NetGalley here, and access in its original Substack serial format (including my audio rendition) as a paid subscriber here. You could certainly read it if you’re worried about “the disappearance of literary men,” even though most of its characters are women or semi-, hemi-, demi-women.¹ (As you may know, I was raised in a beauty shop.)² In any case, you will not want to miss this generations-spanning American saga of art, love, and magic that has been called “breathtaking” on Goodreads, and, on NetGalley, judged as follows:

This is a book for those who relish complexity—for those who read not just to escape but to confront the messy, contradictory nature of human ambition and art. It’s a sharp, unflinching work that lingers long after the final page.

For today, two pieces: the conclusion of my Pound Era trilogy, a discussion of how writers empower themselves by thinking of themselves as belonging to movements and generations; and a personal list of the year’s best reading. Please enjoy!

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Knowledge and the Loss of Power III: Network, Movement, Generation, Empire

Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Christopher Lyman Magee Memorial (1907)

This is the third and final in a sequence of posts inspired by Hugh Kenner’s The Pound Era, one of the 20th century’s most notable works of literary criticism, an artful survey of the abortive renaissance constituted by the modernism of Pound and his circle just before the Great War. The theme of the sequence is knowledge in the making and circulation of art, particularly literature. The first part, about what the artist needs to know, is here, and the second, about what the reader needs to know, here. This one scales up from the individual writer and reader to the larger question of movements and generations.

I am also inspired by Julianne Werlin’s most recent Substack essay, “Intellectual Networks.” Reviewing Randall Collins’s sociology of philosophers, for which philosophy is a matter of networked dialogues, a Socratic dialectic spread across the whole field of active philosophers at any given time, Werlin extends the theory to literary writers.

On the one hand, the theory seems not to fit, since literary writers notionally address the public rather than each other; on the other hand—this is a “sociology of elites,” we are told—as the public recedes from serious reading, and as online networks like Substack itself consume more of the writer’s time and attention, writers become more like philosophers. We discourse with one another rather than with the vaunted common reader. This observation leads Werlin to a further observation: the best literary fiction written by writers active on Substack—a list in which I am grateful to be included—has a recursive, philosophical, theory-like quality:³

When literature is responsive toward its own networks, it tends to resemble, or even to become, philosophy. It’s argumentative, highly intertextual, and typically engaged with abstract ideas. Collins himself discusses a few cases of convergence, including the French Enlightenment (Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot) and Existentialism (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus). But if we’re willing to cast our nets a bit wider, we can find similar tendencies among Renaissance humanists, metaphysical poets (the name, again, is the giveaway), modernists, and so on and on.

I think there’s also something of the kind happening on Substack. There may not be another Voltaire or Diderot on here just yet. But I think we are seeing genuinely new modes of writing emerge among poets and fiction writers who are composing their posts largely for networks of others on the platform. It’s a model where there are few, or no, passive and silent lay audiences. Instead, the structure of the network presses fiction to become conversational, blurring the line between author and narrator, reader and interlocutor. It’s also frequently argumentative, at the edge of opinion and fiction, literature and theory (lowercase t). Perhaps that’s why the most exciting literary fiction I’ve read on here, like that of Paul Franz, Naomi Kanakia, John Pistelli or whatever it is Justin Smith-Ruiu is doing (I couldn’t possibly begin to characterize it, but I love it) tends toward the metafictional and the polemical.

This brings us to the coterie form of artistic affiliation by which the “restricted market of production,” as Bourdieu calls it, i.e., the elite market, perpetuates itself. Modern artists defined the coterie, beginning somewhat inchoately with the Romantics themselves, as a militant “movement.” It may have had the aim of serving as the whole of society’s advance guard, but the movement also augmented each of its members with the power of the group. Referring to Wyndham Lewis, Kenner explains the different uses of the “movement” for painter and writer in the early 20th century:

He had the painter’s special understanding of the use of movements, easily explicated. Movements bear on the painter’s place in a market economy, where the writer’s situation is a little less anomalous. In proportion as his book attracts attention, and then for so long as it pleases, the writer draws money from its sale, but the maker of a picture is paid only once. Expensive resales profit only the resellers. And what he is paid bears no necessary relation to his effort and intelligence, but only to his fame. Fame may be fortuitous; in the 1940’s Grandma Moses commanded better prices than Lewis. It may also be a stock as carefully tended as that of a holding company. What the buyer of a Picasso purchases is just that “a Picasso”: a share in Pablo Picasso's reputation. Picasso shares command high prices. To make a living therefore, such a man incurs the obligations of a dual career: the painter’s, the publicist’s. The painter makes pictures. The publicist shapes nothing—bubble reputation—into “Picasso” or “Braque” or “Warhol”: the heady entity in which people will buy shares in the act of acquiring one of the signed artifacts. […] So Lewis welcomed Pound’s invention of “Vorticism”: something in which the potential purchaser, who literally cannot see a picture, might yet buy shares if it proved its staying power

With the coming of the new online economies of literature typified by Substack, and with the diminution in the old publishing model, the writer increasingly becomes the exact type of “painter/publicist” the visual artist once was, selling not discrete products but a subscription entrée into the whole affective, aesthetic, and intellectual complex our names represent, something for which a slightly elite “mystique” may serve its purpose. Dave Hickey, for one, openly and unfashionably defended the entrepreneurialism of the modernist painter selling paintings as shares in himself to flatter the sensibilities of the buyer, as I discussed when I reviewed the reissue of his classic The Invisible Dragon. But writers persist today in characterizing themselves as anti-capitalists, though we hardly live under capitalism—rather under a managerial technocracy overseen by an interlocking power grid of corporations and governments that strangle competition and individual enterprise. And as the left-liberal literati, having no choice, now gentrifies this online space, which it once stigmatized as a Nazi nest of disinformation, these new literary entrepreneurs still represent themselves as fighting a market economy even as they ask for subscribers.

If we understand ourselves more honestly, however, we may be better able to manage our actual conditions, this having been the promise of an otherwise depressing sociology of the arts in the first place. What if we sociologize not to demystify our success but rather to enable it? And if a “movement” will empower us, then why not a movement?

In this spirit, I responded to an anonymous question on my super-secret Tumblr by hesitantly denominating one such movement. Rejecting—on apolitical grounds—the idea that the next major literature would come from the dissident right, I proposed instead “the unofficial movement (we could say ‘Neo-Romantic,’ though some might object) coalescing on my corner of Substack with people like Matt Gasda, Emmalea Russo, Noah Kumin, Paul Franz, Ross Barkan, perhaps others, maybe even Tao Lin.” Unconsciously I was responding to the incentive Kenner describes: encouraging buyers to acquire shares not only in me, but through me in the glamor of the New Romanticism at large.⁴

I supplement Professor Werlin—Julianne, I should say—with Brother Gasda, Frère Matthieu,⁵ who suggests in a new piece that we grow up a little by taking responsibility for ourselves not as permanent rebels, a ragtag band against the empire, but as the empire’s legitimate because worthier heirs, worthier, anyway, than its past masters. (The implication, offensive to certain sensibilities, is that there will be an empire, whether anyone likes it or not; the only question is who will run it, for what ends, and with what justification?)

My hunch is that post-empire (our present) was never meant to last — and won't. It’s a moment between empires; an interregnum where everything is possible because everyone is starting over. What it shouldn’t become is a parody, free-market version of empire with all the same power-lust and undemocratic harnessing of America’s resources for Titanic ends.⁶

Like a relationship with someone who resembles your ex (“Like my ex, but not crazy,” right?), post-empire promises an inverted version of the empire. Post-empire still exists as part of the dialectic of empire; it hints at a new empire, rather than a new localism.

So while I find an analysis of the binary between empire and post-empire edifying, I wonder if now is not in fact the time to start imagining what lies beyond the concepts of empire — lies elsewhere, and speaks in a different tongue altogether …

The succession from empire to post-empire to neo-empire is a generational one. They say it’s silly to generalize about generations, and yet we do so incorrigibly anyway. My list of “movement” authors above is all Millennial. With the paucity of great Boomer novelists in mind, were we really going to let the diadem of American literature slip right from the Silents to Gen X to the Zoomers, from Didion and DeLillo to Ellis and Franzen directly to our honorificabilitudinitatibus Zoomer, Ms. Levy? Perhaps not. Perhaps our famously late-blooming generation will have its moment. In The Pound Era, Kenner appoints a special destiny to those born in the ’80s. He meant the 1880s, but does this little portrait of a generation straddling two geopolitical and technological realities not evoke those of us born in the 1980s as well?

Eliot’s strange case is in one way paradigmatic: all of them, though they had not his misfortune, could speak a time in speaking their own lives, having been born each one in that decade, the 1880’s, which came to maturity just before the War, and could therefore remember afterward what had been lost. An Auden (born 1907) was too young to manage stereoscopic vision: the world of which he became conscious was wholly post-war. A Ford (born 1873) or a Yeats (born 1865) was too old; after the war Ford lived on his memories, and Yeats as if nothing had occurred but Irish troubles.

A network, a movement, a generation, an empire: a sociology of success: what we all need to know if we want to avail ourselves of the time’s affordances rather than complaining about them merely because they do not resemble the future our past selves expected.

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Time Passes: Personal Bests of the Year

Saint Laurent, As Time Goes By (2024)

It’s a bit early in December for this, and I don’t usually do listicles or gift guides, but what the hell, someone wrote in and asked:

What are your top 5 and bottom 5 novels read this year? (Let’s assume first reads/not re-read for Invisible College)

I replied: I did so much rereading and researching for the IC that I didn’t have time to read enough new or new-to-me novels to make top- and bottom-five lists.

I already said on Substack that I didn’t like Sleepless Nights or Sweet Days of Discipline, despite their current trendiness, so I guess those go on the bottom. To add context for the IC, I read some of the less famous and often early books of canonical novelists on the schedule. I was surprised, then, by how little I liked Melville’s puerile debut, Typee, or Fitzgerald’s even more puerile debut, This Side of Paradise. Those can go on the bottom, too. (Granted, both men were in their early 20s when they wrote them, so their puerility should come as no surprise.)

(But Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities were great, if each a little too “Victorian” in its own way—ponderous in Eliot’s case and stagey in Dickens’s—to make a personal best-of; Dickens’s almost proto-cinematic play-by-other-means digest of Carlyle crowds out characterization, though the historical novel’s set pieces and soaring or screaming rhetoric are extraordinary, while Eliot hadn’t yet found a subject commensurate in its breadth to her genius, thus her portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-woman is like the proverbial cannon trained on a gnat,⁷ despite its credibly apocalyptic ending.)

The best new or newish books I read this year are Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne with its art-world mystique and small-town delirium and holy raptures in cyber- and domestic and consecrated and desert space; Bruce Wagner’s The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories with its indescribably operatic strangeness of voice-vision as if Kafka and Joyce lived on Instagram and TikTok and in Calabasas;⁸ and (though a story collection rather than a novel) Anna Krivolapova’s Incurable Graphomania with its precisely written Russo-American fables of those late-imperial U.S. zones where parapolitics sometimes literally penetrates the debased quotidian.

The best new-to-me classics I read are two strange and “problematic” 20th-century English novels: Iris Murdoch’s agonizingly sensuous and tricky-postmodern ethical construct The Black Prince, a disturbing set of swinging-’60s London meta-variations on Hamlet and Lolita; and D. H. Lawrence’s notoriously “fascist” Mexican hallucination The Plumed Serpent, a deranged and mesmerizingly long, slow visionary novel we disparage and stigmatize because we are afraid of what it portends for the real longings of our Enlightened civilization.

1. The article in question (paywall-bypassing archived link because clickbait gets no clicks from me) is invincibly armored in legacy-media PMC cultural provincialism. “We need men to read so they won’t vote for Trump!” (The next New York Times editorial, probably: bring back literacy tests at the polls for all those black men who voted Republican.) It’s amazing anybody reads when propaganda is the priority of literature’s self-appointed custodians. Anyway, we at Grand Hotel Abyss read the gender (and in fact the race) of the MAGA phenomenon, and thus what the Age-of-Aquarius masses truly if esoterically want, very differently, a thesis in which we are increasingly not alone. My suggestion for the Democrats is therefore also different from the advice everyone else has already dispensed in the last month. A viral X thread, for example, even though I saw it can no longer find it, says they should start calling people “f*gs,” as I predicted in so many words during Brat Summer when Chairman Walz rolled out the “weird” slur. Whereas I think it’s time to get a lot weirder: they should go full Marianne Williamson. I want both parties to be up to their crown chakras in utter psychedelia. Novels, too: this might get more people to read!

2. To satisfy friend-of-the-blog Philip Traylen, I would never say I understood women, or men, or anyone, or myself, only that, other than myself, women are for various reasons mainly the people I have had occasion to observe—except, to be fair, in the literary, artistic, and philosophical canon, in what Melinda Gebbie once called “the jizz-clogged classics.”

3. Two decades ago, someone said, “Theory is the new novel.” Now we might say, “The novel is the new theory.” But as Julianne instructs, at the distant origin of both in the Enlightenment—I make the traditional English-department distinction between “theory” and “philosophy” based on the former’s unsystematic bricolage quality as against the latter’s tendency toward the architectonic—they were indisseverable. The novel and theory always were each other. And if we are atheoretical Francophobes, if we run from Rousseau, are Voltaire-averse, or say Dider-no, we don’t need to cross the Channel to discover this: even a rollicking, earthy, comic English novel like Tom Jones was meant to demonstrate a theory, as was—per the title—Sense and Sensibility.

4. I apologize to anyone I named who doesn’t want to belong to this group and to anyone I didn’t name who does. My aim was neither to be exhaustive nor exclusive. What I mainly had in mind is a group of writers interested in the shaping power of the imagination, the otherworldly sources of imaginative inspiration, or both.

5. I intend my running joke about names and titles to call attention to the ambiguity of this novel social terrain. Are we all authors here, majestic last names in august converse? Or are we friends, on a casual first-name basis? Or are we distinguished colleagues, official or honorary professors and doctors in a post-institutional nascent new institution? Or are we comrades in one cultural struggle, brothers and sisters and sibx?

6. I wonder how this implicit warning to MAGA not to sell out its constituents, with which I agree, squares with Gasda’s recent rumination on the Gilded Age:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this election represents a longing to return to the pre-empire Belle Époque or Gilded Age America. Sure, that era gets a bad rap, especially in terms of political economy, but it also had beautiful cities, a massive railway network, booming industry, healthy farms, and an ability to integrate immigrants. Maybe that’s too rosy a picture, but there’s something about 1900 America—William James’s America—that resonates with me, that seems like the Goldilocks of idealized pasts.

I mention it because I have felt similarly called to the same period, which I never cared about before, finding it dry and “realistic,” except for not so much William as Henry James, the point of whom is that he is not a realist despite surface appearances, that he is the last Romantic and first modernist drowning striated social space in irrepressible flows of consciousness. I never wanted to hear about this period when I was younger; despite my love of the British fin de siècle, I never wanted to hear anything about American literature between 1860 and 1920, between Melville and Faulkner, and I have a lot of gaps in my reading from those intermediate decades—William Dean Howells, for example—but I find I didn’t want to leave it behind this year in the Invisible College.

My native Pittsburgh, which has survived its post-industrial decline not only by embracing new economies of tech and medicine but also by becoming an aestheticized simulacrum of what it was, has largely identified itself with its Gilded Age heritage and celebrated the Beaux-Arts aesthetic as its inmost potential. I appreciate this as an alternative to the right and left’s fixations on the architecture of 20th-century mass politics, on rivalrously cyclopean and inhuman architecture: Art Deco on one side, Brutalism on the other. The Beaux-Arts structure’s floral-stone lyrical enhancement of individual pleasure and uplifting of the individual soul, rather than Deco or Brutalism’s dwarfing of the individual beneath chillingly massive structures, hints at an aesthetic legitimation for renewed or continuing capitalist authority—what the baron owes the people.

7. No wonder it was Proust’s favorite novel. They say you can’t love Proust and Joyce, not really. I have made my choyce, and Addison Rae (see footnote 8 below) has made hers.

8. I was listening to the new and very literary episode of Nymphet Alumni—hey, I haven’t given you a Nymphet Alumni update since spring 2023, in the best and most important Weekly Reading I wrote in all of that year. And novelists should listen to fashion podcasts: unless your characters are Beckettian minds-in-jars, you have to know what they’re wearing. (Now how are we going to get Kendall Jenner to read Major Arcana in public?) As I was saying, I was listening to Nymphet Alumni, and the hosts’ very qualified defense of the lachrymose bizarrerie on the Wicked press tour led me to think about how those stars’ behavior reminds me of a mundane, de-vulgarized, and de-mythicized version of the astonishing love story in the first part of Wagner’s Marvel Universe with its unforgettable subtitle: “be careless what you wish for.” I will have more to say about Wagner in the new year, I’m happy to tell you; perhaps the Millennial movement is electing its own Boomer precursor; he is a perfect example of what a writer can do who dreams of present circumstances rather than merely criticizing them. Our alums, to return to their recent episode, also defend both Cormac McCarthy and Vincenzo Barney on the grounds that a living literary culture requires both morally ambiguous authors and authors who take big stylistic risks. Most intriguingly, and against the prevailing despair about how nobody reads, they note high culture’s reemergence in the fashion world, signaled by onetime TikTokker and pop starlet Addison Rae’s Proustian turn in a series of short films by Saint Laurent. Perhaps not all is perdu.